I thought investors were smart and knew how to calculate odds. There is never any absolutely sure thing. But if a guy has been wildly successful twice aren't the odds pretty good he can do it a third time?
They want to invest, but not at his terms that he's demanding.
The thought experiment is - he wants to raise 1m @ 2m val. 50%. There's not a VC/angel/seed who wouldn't take that deal given who he is. So he's pricing himself at a level he "is willing to do this startup thing again" and it's simply too expensive.
China competitors are always going to be tough to beat in terms of margins.
The Rethink hype video, with their cute little face on a screen.[1]
What the Rethink robot could actually do: take PC boards off a conveyor and put them in a fixture.[2] That's a routine robotic load/unload task. Like this one with Fanuc robots.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mULTknb2I
The conclusion to draw from "tried and failed" certainly isn't "it's impossible and everyone should give up on the notion".
This third company looks interesting but it’s also a flooded market at this point.
So for me the guy never had a real success and is currently building in a market that has been for years flooded with products like his.
His other business was a failure and his third current is in a crowded marketplace. Humanoids are the minority in warehouse automation.
Who is even talking about his argument on humanoids? What does that have to do with my comment. My response was on a comment praising his triple success in business and I am questioning that definition of success.
Are you aware that from an investor perspective, creating a household brand and high IRR though IPO is considered a wild success? All companies eventually decline. By your metrics GE wasn't a wildly successful company either. Or AOL. Or Yahoo. Or Myspace. Every one of those companies eventually declined and your return would be poor if you held on to your investment over their entire arc.
I am not attacking the man only a perspective that I am not sure investors would see him as a wildly successful entrepreneur.
iRobot has sold over fifty million Roombas to date. Packbots are also highly profitable and have saved many lives.
Again as I keep saying. My reply was to someone who said he had three wildly successful companies. Yes iRobot created a segment but I still struggle to classify it as a wild success.
https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRBT/irobot/gross-prof...
From that, they had 13 straight years of profitable net income starting in 2009. Rough recently because they got eaten up by cheaper upstarts; happens to almost everyone eventually. But clearing several hundred million cumulative in net income over a decade+ (peaking 2018-2020, so they were consistently growing from 2009 to 2020 even) is far from "were they ever profitable" territory. They don't have pre-2009 there, but from some other googling it looks like they were profitable by when he left in 2008 after their 2005 IPO. So he was there from inception to IPO and millions-a-year-profitability, and then you're discounting that because 12 years after he left some companies in China had better copies. Building something for 15 years to IPO isn't some VC pump and dump scam, it's harder.
If that's not success you have a ridiculous bar. "So for me the guy never had a real success" - get out of here, do your googling before making claims like that.
Did shareholders and investors collectively make money from the whole ordeal? Looking briefly at the numbers, it looks like they didn't. During the profitable years IRobot made $639 million (sum total) but they lost -$737 in the collapse that followed. No dividends were paid either during the good years. Shareholders were left holding the bag.
Building a business from nothing to IPO is a real accomplishment and I won't diminish that. However, if a business collapses and incinerates more money than it has ever made during the sum of all profitable years calling it a "real success" is a bit of a stretch.